Fukushima fallout: Lessons not learned by the U.S. government

Editor's note: This is one of four essays on nuclear power on the first anniversary of the disaster at the Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan.

Residents and businesses within a 50-mile radius of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station – the evacuation zone prescribed by Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chairman Gregory Jaczko for Americans near last year’s Fukushima nuclear meltdowns – will have a hard time detecting just what lessons have been learned by their own government in the 12 months since the Japanese catastrophe.

The NRC has yet to implement any of its vaunted post-Fukushima safety standards, and Jaczko is reduced to dissenting that his four colleagues (including three Obama appointees) are acting rashly in their hellbent rush to license new plants and extend the operating permits for old ones.

The recent radiation leak at San Onofre Unit 3, and the alarming discovery that 871 of some 9,700 tubes in one of Unit 2’s 2-year-old steam generators are already degraded by 10 percent or more, ominously recall the steam tube problems that originally caused the premature retirement of Unit 1 in 1992 and prompted the $671 million installation of replacement steam generators in Unit 2 and Unit 3 in 2009 and 2010.

Even California’s what-the-traffic-will-bear philosophy of setting electricity rates might have a hard time absorbing the costs of such large amounts of replacement power while paying for repair of the crippled plant at the same time.

“The amount of wear that we are seeing on these tubes is unusual for a new steam generator,” NRC spokesman Victor Dricks told The Washington Post. “If you have that kind of thinning anywhere along the length of the tube, you have a problem because it degrades the integrity of the tube, which can contribute to leaks.”

The Post also interviewed retired NRC engineer and researcher Joram Hopenfeld, who said the company will have to determine why the tubing is degrading so quickly “before they do anything else. I’ve never heard of anything like that over so short a period of time,” Hopenfeld said, “The safety implications could be very, very severe.”

Shortly thereafter, the NRC began referring inquiries to Edison and the utility began stonewalling on details. SCE’s public spokesman offered the opinion, “It’s not unprecedented in the industry for there to be accelerated wear in small sections of tubes in early years of usage.”

Finally, the pablum curtain descended: “Nuclear safety is our top priority,” SCE’s March 2 prepared statement said. Unable to specify when it would bring either Unit 2 or Unit 3 back online, the company press release offered the assurance, “There is no timeline on safety.”

The long-term fate of both Unit 2 and Unit 3 – whether to extend their licenses by an additional 20 years beyond the original 40-year endpoints – may lie in the outcome of new seismic studies ordered by the California Energy Commission in 2008. Despite additional prodding by the state Public Utilities Commission, Edison resisted making such studies a precondition to funding for the license extensions until the 2011 Fukushima experience rendered that position untenable.

Public criticism in Japan has focused on the intertwined relationships between utilities and their regulators, referred to as “amakudari.” In the U.S. we refer to the same phenomenon more derisively as “regulatory capture” and the “revolving door” career path followed by some public officials.

Under amakudari, utility managers and their regulators are professionally related and mutually supportive. Conflict is avoided. This close alignment of interests, however, often becomes an intellectual echo chamber where a cascading of similar viewpoints descends into self-hypnosis.

As Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said recently, Japan’s government came to believe too much in a “myth of safety” and “can no longer make the excuse that what was unpredictable and outside our imagination has happened.”

California’s electricity regulatory culture, and the role that former utility executives (especially from Edison) play within it, is a near carbon copy of amakudari. Whether we can avoid its fatal pitfalls, and learn from the tragedy in Japan, remains very much an open question.

Becker is the executive director of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility and Geesman is a former California energy commissioner.